Charter schools: Beyond the hype

Charter schools are a scam. The people who support charter schools claim they provide a chance for a better education for poor and minority students. However, they don’t fulfill that promise. The evidence is that, on average, charter schools do not provide a better education than public schools (more about this in the conclusion).

What they really do succeed at is providing a rich stream of profit for the private interests behind charter schools. Enough profit to buy the support of legislators, in Florida and other states, on behalf of charter schools and to the detriment of public schools.

It’s important to understand that charter schools are not an isolated case of the private sector encroaching on eminently public functions like education. Charters are just one example of a larger wave of privatization across industries that is a key component of the Republican counterrevolution.

The GOP counterrevolution is a decades-long, unacknowledged ongoing effort to:

(a)   redistribute wealth and income from the middle and the bottom of the economic pyramid to the very top.

That is accomplished through big tax cuts for the rich and big corporations; cuts to programs that benefit the poor and the middle class; and the transfer of not-for-profit public functions into for-profit opportunities for the private sector.  Among the spheres in which this is happening is prisons, health, education, the military and many others. The real goal is never the proclaimed goal. It’s not about better prisons or better schools. It’s about new profits for private companies.

Privatization means more profit for capital and low pay and fewer rights for labor. Privatization results not only in economic redistribution upward but also an increase in the power of bosses over workers and a blow against labor unions. It’s a regressive reshuffling of the share of economic gain and bargaining power. Regressive because those who already had the lion’s share of the economic pie and power now have even more.

(b) restore the supremacy of “real Americans” (white, male, native-born, heterosexual) over all others (people of color, women, immigrants [especially from Asia, Africa, and Latin America] and LGBTQ people).

The GOP’s targeting of the public schools makes sense because the Republican counterrevolution is fundamentally undemocratic while the public school is the most important achievement of American democracy.

The establishment of the public school, free and open to all, was a giant (but insufficient) leap toward a country in which all “men [and women] are [really] created equal.” Rather than working to complete the unfinished democratic promise of the public school (through racial integration and equal resources for schools in rich and poor areas), Republicans have done the exact opposite.

Instead of a workshop of democracy, the GOP see the public schools as a huge, unexploited potential source of profit. They came up with the idea of cynically using the deficient performance and poor image of some public schools to promote charter schools, the perfect example of the GOP policy of socializing costs and privatizing profits. The charter schools are defined as public schools, a questionable definition, given that they are funded by the public’s tax dollars but are run and controlled by the private sector, and private interests reap the profits associated with them.

Republican social “reforms” like charter schools are always sold as a way to help the downtrodden but the real hidden agenda is profits for corporations and the rich. Opportunity zones, sold as a way to get private capital to invest in depressed areas, are being used to finance luxury housing developments, high-end restaurants, and other profitable enterprises. Investors don’t have to pay taxes on their profits from enterprise zones. Banks, real estate interests and wealthy investors are the big beneficiaries while the areas where the poor live receive scant if any benefit.

Like the opportunity zones, charter schools have helped some students but in general they have not benefitted the majority. A study by Stanford University’s Center for Research in Educational Outcomes “compared charter students with demographically similar public school peers, and found that 37 percent of charter school students posted scores on state math assessments that were significantly worse than their public school peers. Forty-six percent of charter school students achieved math scores that were indistinguishable from their public school counterparts. That means that only 17 percent of charter school students — roughly one out of every six — performed better than public school students on state math assessments. In fact, charter school students were more than twice as likely to post math scores that were significantly worse than their public school peers.*

Despite that Florida, where state government is controlled by Republicans, is moving quickly to expand charter schools. Already in one county (Jefferson), all the “public” schools are charter schools. In the unlikely possibility the experiment succeeds, Republicans will use Jefferson County as template for other school districts. If, like the school districts studied by Stanford University, the charters schools perform worse than the public schools, what will the Republicans do?

They likely will follow the lead of their leader President Trump and try to dismiss or distort the facts and carry on with their plans. If we let them.

* The quote comes from a summary of the study by Kevin Hart and is available at the National Educational Association web site (http://www.nea.org/home/33177.htm). The original Stanford study can be accessed at  http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf